Family working to overcome deportation to South Africa

Brendon Camons was the only senior on the stage at Burlington Christian Academy in his blue robe and mortar board.

“We never thought we’d be having a graduation ceremony today,” Burlington Christian High School Principal Michael Loflin said. “But this is the Lord’s plan for Brendon and his family at this time.”

After growing up in Burlington, Brendon, his younger brother Zane, 9, and his parents Marlowe and Caroline are all going back to Cape Town, South Africa, in the coming week. Her visa has run out.

She is in the process of applying for a green card and thinks she has a real chance of getting it since she has a job teaching fifth grade at BCA, and the school is sponsoring her to stay in the country.

“We have worked very hard with the department of immigration,” BCA head administrator Michael Brown told the crowd. “All the things over the years we’ve signed and worked on to make this unnecessary, and here it is.

“It is our great hope that you will be back here with us some day.”

THE CAMONSES were teachers in South Africa. They came to the United States in 2001, “just looking for a break,” Marlowe Camons said.

They came through the North Carolina-based Visiting International Faculty program, giving them one to three years working at local public schools.

The crime rate was much lower here than in Cape Town, but it was still a rough start. The 9/11 attacks came just after they arrived, which terrified their family in South Africa.

For them, differences in things like food were confusing. The first time Marlowe Camons saw pulled-pork barbecue, he threw it away without tasting it. He is a fan now.

Six months into their first year, they had fallen in love with life here.

They had to go back for a year in 2004, but using different visas, they have been in the United States most of the years since.

MARLOWE CAMONS taught science and social studies for two years at Woodlawn Middle School, which he calls “my favorite place in the world to work.”

His visa ran out in 2007, and he has not been able to work since.

Caroline Camons taught at B. Everett Jordan until 2011.

She got the job at BCA, which was willing to sponsor her, and started working on the next step in the convoluted process of getting her permanent status last winter.

She found out in the middle of that process that she should have started before the final year of her visa.

“I didn’t know that,” she said.

The timing might have worked out anyway, Camons said, but the school had to go through an audit to show the sponsorship was legitimate, Camons said.

“It’s been a struggle,” Marlowe Camons said. “But it’s worth a struggle if you want to be an American,”